The most important contest in the game of soccer kicks off
today, the World Cup. While most Americans could give a
headbutt, in Brazil it’s total chaos.

The land of iron ore and soybeans inevitably will be
scrambling to tie up loose ends. Taking down all of that
scaffolding, rounding up all of those cranky, homeless puppies,
cleaning the side-by-side toilets -- oh, wait, that was Sochi.

Like Putin’s $51 billion Olympic Games, this Cup is
expensive by Brazilians’ standards. The estimated $11 billion
has truly gotten under the skin of teachers, health workers and
other public servants. To their mind, wages, services and
working conditions are competing against arenas, roads, and
renovations across 12 cities. Yes, 12 cities. The mayor of Rio
de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, in this video told Bloomberg why
that’s too many.

You might agree from a practical standpoint. Fewer venues
could have meant more money on safety and security. Some
American who either didn’t do his homework or chose to ignore
the memos on the crime epidemic might just wander off from the
Copacabana Palace to have a switchblade thrust at his nose while
struggling to understand, “se você se mexer, eu te corto a
cara.”

But let’s not be complete sour grapes about Brazil’s
ability to pull off a major sporting event with the entire world
and the International Olympic Committee watching ahead of the
2016 Rio Summer Games. For now, forget about the political
impact of a smooth Cup on its October presidential election.

Sochi turned out to be a success story, remember? As Vlad
proved by showing up at Team USA’s house, there’s always plenty
of goodwill and excitement to go around to overshadow the bad.

+ Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, and her
friend Ronald Goldman were murdered 20 years ago today. No one
knows who did it.

+ Manhattan rents are at a five-year high.

+ Twitter, Feedly and Evernote were hit by hacks yesterday.

+ Bank of America persuaded a judge to take a second look
at the SEC’s case against the company’s sale of mortgage-backed
securities. Meanwhile, the Justice Department, in a parallel
criminal case, is preparing to sue the bank as settlement talks
have foundered.

+ Rigging markets in the U.K., or pretty much any market
now, could land you in jail, Chancellor of the Exchequer George
Osborne will announce today as he joins BOE’s Mark Carney to
makes his annual speech to London’s finance industry at a dinner
at the Mansion House in London.

+ Five Congolese soldiers were killed yesterday by Rwandan
forces as the countries test each other’s borders.

***

When the story of investigations into insider trading by
Carl Icahn, Phil Mickelson and Las Vegas gambling pro Billy
Walters broke almost two weeks ago, the speciousness of the
reporting stood out to us. The what-ifs, the timing, the lack of
anything concrete on which the New York Times and Wall Street
Journal had rested their stories gave us pause.

This ought to give more of it: The New York Times is
totally backtracking today on its story that Mickelson traded
illegally in Clorox options.

“The overstated scope of the investigation came from
information provided to the Times by other people briefed on
the matter who have since acknowledged making a mistake,” the
newspaper says today.

Never mind that the signs of “overstated scope” of the
probes were embedded in the newspaper’s language in the original
story, as well as in the version in the Journal, which has
published no similar knockdown of its own reporting.

We all get stuff wrong in this business, though none is as
grievous as errors that ruin a reputation, but we wonder if the
two broadsheets, each aware that the other was on the story,
ignored the holes to avoid getting beat by the competition.

Today the Times says Icahn and Walters are still on the
hook for the Clorox probe, and Mickelson isn’t in the clear over
a similar investigation regarding shares of Dean Foods.

Who’s your source on that?

***

Safety is an issue in Brazil, as alluded to above, in
Portuguese, and not just when hoards of international soccer
fans with wallets bursting, jewelry flashing and clean clothes
screaming “rob me” descend on the biggest sporting spectacle
in the world beside the Olympic Games. Which Brazil also will
host in 2016.

With more than 10,000 miles of borders to guard,
authorities are taking to the air with, you guessed it, drones.
They’re coming from Israeli companies like Israel Aerospace
Industries and Elbit Systems, and they’re succeeding at entering
some of the more dangerous places that cities like Rio have to
offer.

“It’s not just for events like the World Cup,” Vitor
Neves tells Gabrielle Coppola and Blake Schmidt. Neves, vice
president at local Elbit unit AEL Sistemas, says the drones
“are needed for day-to-day things as well.”

***

This would all be a lot more enjoyable if the Brazilians
themselves weren’t so antagonistic about the tournament, but
they have a lot of things to complain about.

Yet the investment community sees optimism in Brazil even
when Brazilians find little of it. From Apple finally opening a
store in Rio that Steve Jobs wanted no part of to BMW building a
plant, non-Brazilians are finding silver linings, Peter Robison,
David Biller and Christiana Sciaudone write today for Bloomberg
Markets magazine.

One of them is Pimco, which finds the conditions right for
investment because the country’s assets are undervalued and “a
lot of bad news is priced in,” Deputy Chief Investment Officer
Mark Kiesel reported in April. You will probably be able to hear
him elaborate on this when he appears on Bloomberg Surveillance
with Tom Keene today at 9:30 a.m. on Bloomberg Radio.

So, if your goal (sorry) is finding an underappreciated
opportunity, there are those who are finding now is not the time
to pass (sorry) but to strike (sorry).

***

Is there a pet lover in your house who couldn’t “give a
headbutt” about the World Cup but wants to capture some of that
excitement and some spirit of competition? Like it does for the
Super Bowl with its “Puppy Bowl,” Animal Planet has you
covered with “World Pup.”

The online contest pits dogs representing their home
countries -- French Bulldog, Australian Cattle Dog, etc. -- and
you get to vote for your favorite. (Well, not you, of course.)

Like the real games, the tournament kicks off today.

The competition looks pretty ruff.

***

Back in the U.S., things are getting better but the
country’s going to seed. That’s not the most precise reading of
today’s installment of the Bloomberg National Poll, but you
could read it that way. While 55 percent of respondents said
they’re closer to their goals for their careers and finances,
only 26 percent saw the U.S. heading in the right direction.

Obama’s getting the blame for not making us feel more
economically secure or fighting hard enough for the middle
class, Mike Dorning writes today in the part of the poll dealing
with economic issues.

“It’s as though Americans are living in an increasingly
comfortable bubble, watching a world that appears to be
increasingly troublesome,” said J. Ann Selzer, co-founder of
polling company Selzer & Co., making an observation that
probably could have come at any time since the end of the Second
World War.

Selzer’s company also found two-thirds of Americans no
longer think the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, so this
will give Dave Brat an idea of where not to start if he’s got
any sense.

***

Iraq’s readiness for controlling the forces that want to
tear it apart, three years after the U.S. pulled out, doesn’t
look good.

Sunni militants emboldened by their fighting in Syria are
pouring toward Baghdad, having overrun Mosul on Tuesday, where
more than 80 Turks were taken hostage, and taking Tikrit and
areas in Baiji yesterday.

Iraqi troops rose to the occasion by fleeing en masse, more
than 150,000 of them in Mosul, and leaving their weaponry for
the fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to
take up.

Late yesterday the ISIL fighters were staging outside
Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, and Iraq has been asking
U.S. for help in the form of airstrikes from either drones or
fighter planes.

ISIL will “consolidate their hold on huge swaths of Iraq,
cutting the country into three pieces” along ethnic and
geographic lines, an outcome the U.S. had sought to avoid during
its occupation of the country from 2003 to 2011, Nicole Gaouette
reports, quoting Washington Institute fellow Michael Knights.

***

As the U.S. Open tees off today at Pinehurst No. 2 in North
Carolina, we celebrate golf’s traditions and mysticisms, the
timeless aspects to an ancient sport ingrained in the psyche of
the player who knows his game in his bones.

Kidding. Quantitative analytics is taking over the game and
it’s going to take all that mojo and send it the way of metal
spikes. When once a pinch of grass tossed into the breeze and a
ball-washer at each tee box counted as technology, we now have
the dawn of sensor-fed data arriving in real time to your smart-thing.

You’ve done the video thing, watching playbacks of your
swing, and you might have opted for some other gadgets: the
sensor that clips to your glove and offers swing data, the laser
rangefinder, or the Garmin watch that locates your position on
the hole and distance to the green, etc.

But the Arccos system to which Erik Matuszewski introduces
us today is the next level, syncing sensors on your club to GPS
and your handheld device and rendering instant data on shot
distance, putting, how and where you shank and more. There are
already similar technologies, but it’s the real-time aspect that
is the feature of this system. Matuszewski’s story notes the
technology could help you “change tactics during play.”

Oh great.

Is this going to be the golf version of people texting
while driving? Instead of some minivan twaddling down the open
road at a measured speed unconnected to the flow of the rest of
traffic, do we get to look forward to some dork pulling out his
iPhone for a few minutes at regular intervals to confirm the
reasons his game sucks?

Golf is already so slow now that the USGA wants you to play
only half of it at a time. Is this what leisure has become? Talk
about a good walk spoiled. Oy.

***

It’s pretty odd around here when golf’s U.S. Open is
practically an afterthought, but with the World Cup stealing the
limelight, we found Mike Buteau down at Pinehurst on the eve of
the tournament without his customary reporting partner
Matuszewski and staying with his in-laws, who happen to live in
Pinehurst.

“Sleepy little town, center of the state, nothing else to
do here except play golf. I mean, it’s a nice town. It’s very
laid back, very quiet. It’s a little bit of Mayberry with a lot
of golf mixed in. And it’s ridiculously hot. There’s pretty much
a chance of afternoon thunderstorms almost every day.”

What’s the buzz?

“The buzz is the golf course. It is completely changed
from when they last had it here in 2005. They have stripped it
of 40 acres of Bermuda grass -- it’s now like a barren sort of
dusty, sandy course. It looks a little bit like a British Open
course -- looks nothing like Augusta National, which is green
from first tee to 18th green. Here it’s kind of green in spots,
brown in a lot of other spots and very sandy everywhere. That’s
pretty much the main story for this tournament.

‘‘Obviously the other story is Mickelson trying to complete
the career grand slam. He has six runner-up finishes in the U.S.
Open, which is an amazing number, but he missed the cut at the
Masters, he missed the cut at the Players Championship, he’s had
a pretty mediocre season by his own admission, but still says
that he would relish the chance to win this week.

‘‘Those are the two main stories, but I think the golf
course is the main story this week.”

Why did they do that to the course?

“Several reasons. One is that they wanted to restore it to
the way it was originally done under Donald Ross, and they just
wanted to breathe some new life into the resort. They had seen a
decline in visitors, the course had become a bit average. It was
a championship course but there was nothing that really stood
out about it, that made it unique.

‘‘The other part of it is maintenance. They’ve cut the
amount of water that they’re using on the course in half, there
are fewer sprinkler heads out there. It’s a much more natural-looking course.

‘‘They also moved tees back. (Ed: the course is 348 yards
longer.) It’s (still) a par-70 course, but it’s really long.
Like most major venues, it favors longer hitters, but it also
favors those who are a little bit lucky. Because instead of
having thick rough on the side of the fairways, there’s sand and
wiregrass and clumps of, as they’re calling it, natural areas.

‘‘It’s still an incredibly difficult golf course, but
you’ll have more of a chance of advancing the ball from the
sandy areas then you did when it was all thick rough. A little
bit longer but much less rough.”

Sounds like you could expect some links-style, bump-and-run
type of play.

“Absolutely. This is a course that requires a lot of
imagination. The greens here especially -- they call them
turtleback greens. Imagine putting on the back of a turtle --
how difficult it is to get it close to the hole. That is going
to be the determining factor: who can putt on these greens, and
who can put themselves into position to actually have a putt at
the hole.

‘‘It absolutely has much more of a links-style than what
you would see typically in the U.S., and especially for those
people who are used to tuning into golf and seeing Augusta
National, this course looks drastically different. Bubba Watson
said the only similarity between the two courses is that they
both have 18 holes.’’

Has there been any sort of distraction from Mickelson’s
non-golf headlines?

‘‘Not really. He was asked very vaguely about it during his
press conference, about how he keeps his focus with ‘things that
are going on off the golf course,’ and he kind of dodged the
question. But there hasn’t been too much buzz on it, simply
because people don’t necessarily know what to think of it. He
hasn’t addressed it this week and hasn’t been asked much about
it.”

Who ya got?

“I am sticking with my guy, Matt Kuchar.”

Again?

“Yes. He is without a doubt one of the best players in the
world who hasn’t won a major. So, he’s due. And this is actually
a course that suits him because he’s very patient and the U.S.
Open definitely requires a lot of patience, and this course
especially. He hits the ball pretty straight, he’s made
improvement in every area of his game, and, well, like I said --
I’m going to stick with him until he wins, because eventually
I’m going to be right.”

***

The NHL Stanley Cup finals shift back to Los Angeles for
Game 5 tomorrow night after New York Rangers goaltender Henrik
Lundqvist showed a return to form last night in his team’s 2-1
defeat of the Los Angeles Kings.

If the Rangers win the next game, which they have to for
this observation to make any sense, it feels like a whole new
series is likely.

***

Game 4 of the NBA finals is tonight in Miami, with the San
Antonio Spurs holding a 2-1 series lead over the Heat.